Hiding in plain sight
The answer to your quandary is right there, in front of you.
It’s just that it involves more work, more risk or more trade-offs than you were hoping for.
Quality and effort
It seems as though the opposite of “careless” ought to be “careful.” That the best way to avoid avoidable errors is to try harder, to put more care into the work.
This means that if surgeons were more careful, there would be fewer errors. And that so many of the mistakes that mess things up would go away if people just tried harder.
And this is true. For a while. But then, it’s not effort but systems that matter.
Years ago, I created a trivia game for Prodigy. The first batch of 1,000 questions was 97% perfect. Which is fine, until you realize that this meant that 30 questions had an error. And every error ruined the experience for the user.
The second batch, we tried extra hard. Really hard. Our backs were against the wall and we couldn’t afford any errors. Our effort paid off in a 50% decrease in errors. We were down to 1.5%. Alas, that’s still 15 game breakers.
Then, I got smart and I changed the system. Instead of having trivia writers work really hard to avoid mistakes, we divided our team in half. Half the team used the encyclopedia (yes, it was a long time ago) to write the questions, and they made a photocopy of the source, along with the question, and put it in a notebook.
The other half of the team got the notebook and was charged with answering the question based on the source. They got a bonus of $20 for every question they found where their answer was more correct than the original.
The result of the new system? Zero error for the next 5,000 questions.
We need to put care into our systems. We need to build checklists and peer review and resilience into the way we express our carefulness. It seems ridiculous that a surgeon needs to write her name (with a Sharpie) on the limb that she’s about to operate on, but this simple system adjustment means that errors involving working on the wrong limb will go to zero.
In school, we harangue kids to be more careful, and spend approximately zero time teaching them to build better systems instead. We ignore checklists and processes because we’ve been taught that they’re beneath us.
Instead of reacting to an error with, “I need to be more careful,” we can respond with, “I can build a better system.”
If it matters enough to be careful, it matters enough to build a system around it.
The first 1,000 are the most difficult
For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.
A collection of daily bloggers I follow have passed 1,000 posts (it only takes three years or so…). Fortunately, there are thousands of generous folks who have been posting their non-commercial blogs regularly, and it’s a habit that produces magic.
Sasha, Gabe, Fred, Bernadette and Rohan add value to their readers every day, and I’m lucky to be able to read them. (I’m leaving many out, sorry!) You’ll probably get something out of reading the work of these generous folks, which is a fabulous side effect, one that pays huge dividends to masses of strangers, which is part of the magic of digital connection.
What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it. Give it a try for three or four months and see what happens…
Just because you don’t understand it
…doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
…doesn’t mean it isn’t important.
If we spend our days ignoring the things we don’t understand (because they must not be true and they must not be important) all we’re left with is explored territory with little chance of improvement.
The problem with people is that they outnumber you
It doesn’t make any sense to spend your life proving them wrong, it’s a losing battle.
Far more effective is the endless work of building connection, forming alliances and finding the very best you can in those you engage with.
You can’t possibly know what it’s like to be someone else, but it’s also true that no one knows what it’s like to be you.
One more reason to put in the effort to find the good.
Non-profit overhead
Skeptical non-donors often point to the amount a charity spends on non-direct spending as a reason to hesitate in contributing. It’s easy to imagine that a cause that spends 90% of what it raises on direct action (not HQ, not salaries, not fundraising) is better than one that spends 80%.
We say we care about overhead, but what we really care about is impact, or status, or momentum. What we measure isn’t a simple percentage, it’s a lot deeper than that.
Waste isn’t a good thing. Of course not. But leaving aside the football teams and the jets at some colleges, those high salaries at some non-profits might just be buying insights and effort that you can’t get any other way. And those leaders might be bringing strategic insights and efficiencies to their cause that a well-meaning bootstrapper just can’t deliver.
Everywhere else in our lives, we happily invest in the best solution to our problem. Whether it’s surgery, vegetables or a designer, we seek to invest in expertise and resources that not only fit our budget but get the job done.
If a problem is worth solving, it’s worth engaging with the right people to solve it with urgency, isn’t it?
Ambidextrous
Anthropologists have found that we’re very motivated to divide into teams, and once on a team, we’ll work hard to degrade the other team. Over the smallest differences. For the smallest possible stakes. Even when we get no other benefit than thinking that we won something.
We spend a lot of time sorting people into buckets. We label them in order to treat them differently and establish expectations for how they’ll respond. Mostly to figure out which team they’re on. An email from a stranger causes us to spend some time guessing their status, gender and connection to us.
Which team?
Strangely, we don’t care so much about whether someone is right handed or left handed. We don’t waste cycles on dividing people by whether they can curl their tongue or even if they can play the piano.
I totally understand our caring about Yankees vs. Red Sox. About seeking out team affiliation when team affiliation is a choice, when it’s intentionally competitive, when it tells us something about what’s going to happen next.
But if we’re not sure of someone’s gender, religion, citizenry, sexual orientation or race, we can get very uptight. Ambidextrous (unsorted) in these areas is a problem, apparently, even though there’s no relationship (zero) between the things that matter (attitude, skills, talents) and the easily measured team affiliation that we all seem so concerned about.
And that leads to a great opportunity. If you can be the person who coordinates the work of people regardless of their designated unasked-for affiliation, you’ll be able to find brilliant contributors that others foolishly overlook.
The room has more room than ever for those willing to be ambidextrous, to follow a path that’s not previously defined. Work with them or get out of their way.
Stet
There’s a term in copyediting called “stet.”
That’s what you write when you want the copyeditor to not make the indicated change. It’s probably Latin for, “leave my best work alone, please.”
Too often, in a committee, we bend to the fear of those that would prefer we fit in, dumb it down and average it out.
Better, I think, to simply say, “stet.” No drama, no explanation. Simply, “stet.”
Your work is worth it.
The antidote
It’s worth picking a philosophy that’s self correcting.
The antidote to junk science is more science, good science. Science is a self-correcting process, where transparency leads to improvement.
The antidote to bad engineering is more engineering. Engines and bridges run better today than they did a hundred years ago.
The antidote to blind obedience to unexamined edicts and principles, though, is not more obedience. It doesn’t self correct. It gets worse.
[For those interested in constructive innovation instead of obedience, please consider the altMBA. Today’s the early deadline for our next session.]
Make better promises
We spend so much of our time keeping promises, fretting about promises, whittling down promises… that we rarely put the effort into creating better ones.
More generous.
More urgent.
More personal.
Your brand is a promise and your work is delivering on it.
What have you promised us lately?